Start hiring from the ground up after moving to another city
I remember my first hr-talk - it was so awkward. Nobody prepared me for it. Nobody walked me through anything, gave me any tips, I was just left alone to ask some questions for a person who was applying for a senior role. It went so bad and I was so stressed! I cherished that memory in order not to make the same mistake with my peers :).
Fast forward and I just moved to a new city (my 4th one!) where I was supposed to start an R&D office. This was definitely something out of my comfort zone but I was very lucky to find some great people - which most of them I had the luck to work with for quite some time.
To be honest, I’m not a fan of hiring - in a way, it’s not my favorite thing in the world to do - properly preparing for an interview takes so much time and focus, the market nowadays is even crazier than it was a few years ago and finding right people is so hard that it can be frustrating.
Even if you try to remove all the bias and have really structured process (so you can have a point of reference) it can still feel blurry sometimes. After all, we’re all just humans and some things are simply very difficult to quantize.
We try to put people in boxes called “senior”, “lead material”, “strong junior with a lot of potentials”, but even with long recruitment processes, references checks and so on we can fail miserably.
I’m very grateful that I had soooo much luck finding so many great people who are crushing it at companies like Gitlab, Typeform, or are building digital currencies for countries in the Caribbean regions (hi Bartosz). I hope that someday I will find joy in hiring again because building teams is fun, it’s challenging, and most of all, in my opinion - is very blurry. People are much more complex than code and debugging people can be difficult ;).